At this point you've got a lot of systems good for targeting stationary objects, because your sensors are still limited to Newtonian speeds. Great for aiming at a planet or other fixed body, not so great for a dynamic engagement-your weapons are moving faster than light, but your sensors aren't overcoming light delay.
Put it this way: there's about a 20 minute lag on signals from Mars to Earth. It takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach earth at closest approach.
You're showing off weapons that reach interstellar distances instantaneously. There's not a lot of advantage in having FTL munitions at ranges where an enemy can't evade a light beam by using random-walk evasion.
which he'd be using at newtonian line of sight anyway.
AOE isn't going to do you much good in hard vacuum either-the shielding necessary to keep your crew safe in peacetime will handle the radiation pulse of a nuke at close range, and there's no medium for translating shockwaves outside the hull, so the blast wave and most secondary effects aren't going to carry very far.
main problems I see then, are that you have to completely revamp the tech base, at which point, you might as well be playing a different game entirely-one that includes FTL sensors and FTL targeting, with cheap, low-effort broad-band FTL commo.
Oh, sorry. I briefly mentioned the sensors are also K-F based as well, but I didn't elaborate.
Either way, you make a board game on a hex map work, THEN you work out how the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo works to match the gameplay. Fun trumps science.
So, I do actually have FTL sensors. You can target a ship a long ways off and hit it, and know you hit it. None of it is Newtonian.
What scale that works out to be I kind of want to be vague about, since science geeks will over-analyze it, push their glasses up their nose, saying, "Well, actually.....". I don't need that sort of headache.
The core rule/thing is that weapon ranges, the speeds ships can move, and sensor ranges all scale the same rates, so a fight in deep, deep interstellar space will be LONG distances, but a hell of a lot less distances are involved when near a planet. So on a hex map that is taking cues from BattleTech, lets say its about 9 hexes is still medium range, 21 is long range. However, in a solar system the distances are a lot less, and near a planet with a moon, probably a lot shorter ranged in reality.
But it still the same 9 hexes on a map. Each hex is it's own distance that gets larger as you get farther away from any heavy mass objects like planets and stars. A ship with a speed of 3 is going to take 10 turns to cross a mapsheet on your kitchen table that is 30 hexes wide. A dense asteroid belt map (and in reality the Sol asteroid belt rocks are actually really far apart from each other), you may be fighting a battle that is less than that in size, physically, but it still a hex map 30 hexes wide. The gameplay will be the same. Ships move the same, guns fire the same ranges, and sensors can see all of it.
If you want initial numbers, and I'm not set in stone what I want yet anyway, I am thinking of ships crossing solar systems in about a single day, and weeks to cross the space between stars.
The goal is to have gameplay that is a lot more like WW-1 ships in space, but with islands (planets) to maneuver around. A map could have a single solar system on it, and you can explain why the vast distances between planets, especially in the outer solar system are so short is because of that non-linear scale. And that scale affects sensor ranges, movement speeds, and weapon ranges all the same as they're all based on my new K-F tech, so you don't need new statistics for every single different environment.
Long story short. Its a game. It won't always make total sense, but its the way it is for gameplay. Even newer BattleTech rulebooks mention how ridiculously short the weapon ranges are, but you are just to go with it and not worry about that stuff. Same goes here.
